On August 28, Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co.,Ltd. (600887.SH) released its H1 2025 financial report, achieving total operating revenue of 61.933 billion yuan, 1.49 times that of the industry's second-largest player, maintaining an absolute leading position while recording a counter-trend growth of 3.37% year-on-year. Additionally, the company's adjusted net profit attributable to shareholders reached 7.016 billion yuan, up 31.78% year-on-year, firmly maintaining its position as Asia's leading dairy company with an adjusted net profit margin of 11.33%, significantly higher than industry peers.
The company has established a diversified portfolio across multiple categories including liquid milk, dairy beverages, milk powder, yogurt, ice cream, cheese, butter, and cream, continuously promoting the upgrading of dairy supply structure. This diversified business combination experienced comprehensive growth in H1, driving balanced and steady overall performance growth.
In H1, the liquid dairy business achieved operating revenue of 36.126 billion yuan, with multiple categories showing impressive growth. Low-temperature fresh milk grew by over 20%, while liquid dairy B2B business revenue also achieved double-digit growth. The milk powder and dairy products business generated operating revenue of 16.578 billion yuan, up 14.26% year-on-year. The ice cream business recorded operating revenue of 8.229 billion yuan, growing 12.39% year-on-year. These three major businesses accounted for 58.33%, 26.77%, and 13.29% of total revenue respectively.
Clearly, Yili's balanced business portfolio and the solid foundation plus multiple growth engines it has built became the primary driver of this performance, representing one of the company's greatest advantages over competitors. More importantly, each major category in Yili's business portfolio holds the industry's No.1 position and continues to strengthen its leading advantage.
Taking the core liquid dairy business as an example, the overall ambient yogurt market share increased by 4.3 percentage points in H1, maintaining industry leadership. The star product Ambrosial has dominated retail sales rankings for consecutive years, while market shares in ambient yogurt, ambient dairy beverages, and premium fresh milk all grew comprehensively.
As one of the growth engines, multiple categories in milk powder and dairy products maintain commanding market share leads. According to comprehensive data from Nielsen and Xingtu third-party research, H1 overall infant formula (including cow and goat milk powder) retail market share reached 18.1%, up 1.3 percentage points year-on-year. Specifically, goat milk powder market share reached 34.4%, up 3 percentage points, while adult milk powder business retail market share reached 26.1%, up 1.8 percentage points year-on-year. Both milk powder categories firmly hold industry-leading positions.
While deepening its dairy business, Yili is accelerating expansion into non-dairy segments, creating a healthier balanced portfolio structure. The healthy water and beverage business has demonstrated strong growth momentum. Following the market success of Yike Living Spring jasmine tea, mellow oolong, and ginseng-goji health water, Yili rapidly launched new products in H1 including Yike Living Spring matcha green tea, light oolong, and "Quan Ai Baobei" low-sodium mineral water specifically designed for infants, driving double-digit high-speed growth in the water and beverage business.
Yili's balanced business portfolio breaks the traditional dairy company growth model, building cross-industry new growth curves and higher-dimensional competitive moats. The company's comprehensive category layout continues to advance, with multiple categories maintaining market share dominance, showing a trend of the strong becoming stronger. These multi-dimensional competitive advantages have built strong foundational capabilities for the company, maintaining industry-leading performance while enabling rapid global market expansion.
Notably, the company continues to invest in R&D and innovation capabilities to maintain product leadership in the industry, with R&D expenses growing 11.4% year-on-year in H1. On one hand, the company actively explores and invests in new category development to meet diverse consumer needs. On the other hand, it uses high quality as its competitive advantage, with raw milk's core indicators far exceeding EU standards.
Furthermore, accelerating the construction of China's distinctive dairy deep-processing system and transitioning to higher value-added segments represents another major strategic initiative Yili is advancing, marking an important milestone in Chinese dairy industry development. The company has achieved breakthroughs in key raw material localization, building a new framework of "raw material safety + autonomous and controllable industrial chain," driving China's dairy industry to complete a strategic leap from "being constrained by others" to "autonomous control," truly achieving "Chinese cheese made in China."
In innovation capabilities, the company is also expanding industry boundaries, such as creatively pioneering new categories of health dairy products with medicinal and edible homology, exploring the establishment of more authoritative industry standards, actively promoting the improvement of enterprise and technical standards for "medicinal and edible homology," laying a solid foundation for new track development.
Based on its strong foundation, Yili's globalization strategy is accelerating. In May this year, Jindinguan fully entered the Hong Kong market. In June, Cremo officially launched in Saudi Arabia. In August, Yili showcased its overseas ice cream brands Joyday and Cremo at the FIBA Asia Cup, demonstrating global brand strength. In H1, the company's overseas core ice cream business revenue grew 14.4% year-on-year, while infant goat milk powder business revenue surged 65.7%.
The company's global expansion is not unidirectional but adopts a localized cultivation and supply chain synergy model. On the resource side, it integrates global high-quality raw materials to ensure continuous product quality improvement. On the innovation side, it gathers cutting-edge scientific research capabilities, converting technological advantages into product competitiveness to benefit global markets. On the market side, through deep localized operations and global channel synergy, it rapidly responds to diverse consumer needs, enhancing overseas market penetration and brand influence.
Overall, Yili's balanced growth model and full-category leadership, continuously creating high-quality and innovative products, will continue to drive its long-term trend of the strong becoming stronger in the domestic market. Meanwhile, accelerated overseas market expansion is expected to rapidly grow into a new growth engine leveraging product advantages and market scale advantages, jointly driving sustainable performance growth.
Under scale growth, continuous cost and expense optimization will bring profit improvement and cash inflow to the company. The company maintains strong operating cash net inflow, showing a continuous upward trend over the past three years (2022-2024), with an average net inflow of 17.82 billion yuan. This also provides confidence for the company's high dividends, with cumulative cash dividends of 22 billion yuan during this period, maintaining dividend ratios consistently above 70%. With further improvement in 2025 adjusted net profit, the market expects the company's annual dividend amount to potentially reach new highs. The company's performance growth and high dividends will also be reflected in its market value, with potential for valuation restructuring in the medium to long term.
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